The Itanium Solutions Blog

On behalf of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, I would like to congratulate our 2010 Innovation Award Humanitarian Impact winner and category finalists who are being announced this week. Our Humanitarian winner is COMPUTAEX from the the Extremadura region of southwestern Spain. COMPUTAEX relies on an Itanium-based supercomputer to support a wide variety of complex social, environmental, and scientific improvement projects for the region. Their entry was truly outstanding and we applaud their significant list of achievements and positive impact since completing their launch in March 2009.

I would also like to recognize the impressive list of finalists in our other categories as selected by our esteemed panel of judges. They are as follows:

Computationally Intensive Applications:

- COMPUTAEX
- eBay
- University of Malaga

Data Center Modernization:

- Fraport AG
- Future Electronics
- MegaFon

Mission-Critical Data:

- Nordea Bank Finland
- Taiwan’s Bureau of Labor Insurance
- The Shanghai Stock Exchange
- Yodobashi Camera

Winners of these other categories will be announced on September 14th, 2010 at the Innovation Awards Celebration in San Francisco at The Westin St. Francis. This was a banner year for the Innovation Awards program, with submissions received from across the globe from companies, universities and not for profit organizations — all of whom are realizing truly impressive results from their Itanium-based servers. Thank you to all of our entrants and to our judges!

On behalf of the Alliance I am delighted to welcome our newest Alliance Sponsor Inspur from China. Inspur is a
true pioneer. As the first domestic server provider in China, Inspur provides customers with integrated technology solutions including servers, storage systems, commercial computers, and intelligent terminals. Inspur’s new Itanium 9300-based products currently under development will be part of their ”Superpower” line. Inspur has been a leader in helping to shape the mission-critical server landscape in China. They recently participated on a panel at IDF Beijing with fellow Alliance member, Insyde Software talking about server firmware advancements in support of large-scale server systems. We look forward to a multi-faceted engagement with Inspur an to hearing more about their Itanium-based products!

Zhang Dong, VP of High End Server R&D at Inspur passed along the following message to the Itanium ecosystem:

Congratulations to Alliance sponsors Bull, Hitachi and NEC on their recent server announcements featuring Intel Itanium 9300 Series processors.

Bull’s new novascale gcos 9010 is being marketed as the world’s first mainframe natively equipped with an Open Source database for the intensive production requirements. These mainframes are being targeted at customers looking to implement a Private Cloud computing model for their mission critical enterprise applications.

Hitachi has announced 5 new Itanium-based servers - the HA8500 series - running the HP-UX operating system which also feature the Itanium 9300 processor which they expect to deliver twice the system performance of their existing models. The new system include an integrated memory controller that significantly increases the transmission speed between the processor and memory. Hitachi is featuring traditional mid-range server offerings plus several models of Itanium-based blade servers to provide maximum flexibility and expansion capabilities for customers.

NEC has also released 5 new severs - the NX7700i series - based on the Itanium 9300 processor which include a new high end server model, 3 blade server models and a rackmount model. These new servers from NEC available in Japan, run HP-UX and will be focused on high end mission critical data base and server integration solutions and as serving as platforms for cloud computing applications. NEC differentiates its offerings by their high availability middleware, ClusterPro X HA and through their services and Systems integration offerings.

Congratulations to HP on the launch of their next generation of mission critical servers, based on the Intel Itanium 9300 series processor, which were announced this week at the Tech@Work show in Germany. The Integrity servers were rolled out as part of HP’s new mission-critical Converged IT Infrastructure strategy. The launch event consisted of a series of videos and downloadable content accompanied by live expert chats. The launch site had numerous links to whitepapers and other technical content for customers interested in finding out more about the new servers and their capabilities. One of the videos features a chat between Kirk Skaugen of Intel and Martin Fink of HP talking about Itanium and Integrity servers as having the performance and RAS features customers require when downtime simply is not an option. They also talk about the healthy, future “Itanium Roadmap” through the next generations of Poulson and Kittson which will be socket compatible with the 9300 Series. There is a lot of excellent content available on the HP launch site that is well worth viewing.

For those of you who closely  follow the server marketplace, I don’t have to tell you that there has been quite a lot of coverage on Itanium in the past couple of months, some of it inaccurate. From the Alliance perspective, we can say with confidence that Itanium is here to stay and  for those customers whose applications demand nothing less than the bulletproof capabilities and RAS features that Itanium provides, Itanium will continue to be offered as a core element in a range of mission-critical operating environments, with a comprehensive choice of hardware platforms and solutions available for the most demanding workloads.

During the Itanium 9300 series launch, commitments on future Itanium-based systems were made by vendors HP, NEC, Hitachi, Bull, Supermicro, and new Itanium OEM  Chinese manufacturer, Inspur. The 9300 series has been designed to support the most-mission critical systems in the world. It offers twice the performance of its predecessor, a massive 30MB on-die cache, and enhanced Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) features found on no other Intel processor. Details are available from Intel in the Intel Itanium Processor 9300 Series whitepaper.

We look forward to learning more about future Itanium generations Poulson & Kittson as details become available. But we know now that Poulson, due in 2012, will be socket compatible with the 9300 series, manufactured on Intel’s 32nm process, include more cores, more threads, run at a higher lock frequency, support a number of instruction-level advancements, and include even more RAS features.

On the Alliance front, we are full speed ahead with all of our programs including the 2010 Itanium Innovation Awards. As submission have been arriving, it’s been  fascinating to read about  the many compelling “real world” Itanium solutions out there producing impactful and tangible results. Please share your Itanium success stories with us and we look forward to promoting your success at our 2010 Awards Celebration in September.